The present invention relates to a vacuum treatment system for depositing thin coatings on substrates, with several stationary treating chambers that are held by an annular or frame-like side wall of the vacuum chamber and contain the processing tools, and with openings aligned on the center of the vacuum chamber and extending in planes parallel to each other.
A vacuum treatment system is known with a main chamber and/or distributor chamber (EP 0 555 764) inside which the substrates or work-pieces to be coated are conveyed by means of a conveyance mechanism between at least two processing chambers or between a storage lock chamber and at least one processing chamber. In this way, a portion or all of the processing chambers can be separated in sealed manner by means of hydraulically or pneumatically actuated seals from the main chamber and/or distributor chamber. The system is designed as a cylinder and at least one receiving chamber or one container for receiving the substrates to be processed is arranged along the casing of a circular or cylindrical distributor chamber, which are directed in the respective processing positions toward the corresponding processing stations arranged in the cylindrical casing in order to form the processing/process chambers. The receiving chambers/containers or the cylindrical casing are arranged rotating around the cylinder's center line.
A system is also known for depositing coatings on supports in a vacuum (DE 28 48 480), in particular for the alternate depositing of metal coatings and of luminous polymerization coatings on supports in the manufacture of electric film capacitors, which has at least two vacuum chambers that are separated from each other by vacuum locks and in which there is a lower remaining pressure in the first vacuum chamber during operation than in the second chamber or in the other chambers. This has a conveyance system that can convey each of the supports to be coated through a separate vacuum lock from the first vacuum chamber into the second vacuum chamber and again into the first chamber or into a third vacuum chamber. The vacuum chambers contains systems for depositing coatings onto the supports situated on the conveyance system. The vacuum locks each have several jaws that are situated opposite a surface or surfaces of the conveyance system and leave only a narrow gap open to it or them. Between each of the two jaws, there is a suction pipe for extraction of the remaining gas. The conveyance system is movable only in one direction and the vacuum lock situated before the first vacuum chamber in the moving direction of the conveyance system has longer diffusion paths than the vacuum lock situated after the first vacuum chamber.